Displaying 41 - 57 of 57 articles

According to Jacques Derrida, “nothing can be invented on the subject of Joyce”. Speaking in 1984, he had in mind the sheer comprehensive power of Joyce’s writing: from the capacity of Ulysses to draw…

In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, the fictional character Whisky Sisodia comments that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo…

You may write me down in history With your bitter twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. So begins one of Maya Angelou’s poems, written in 1978. One of her most…

Tolkien probably would have destroyed the work if he thought it might be published.
Galaxy fm ®May 29, 2014

Fans of J R R Tolkien must wonder why there is any controversy associated with the recent publication of his 1926 translation of Beowulf. For them anything new from Tolkien is welcome. But imagine if Tolkien’s…

The next Shakespeare… in a manner of speaking.
EPA/Paul BuckMay 9, 2014

The exam board OCR recently announced a new English Language and Literature A Level that they intend to offer from 2015. The proposed syllabus boasts that “the range of texts to be studied is to be the…

In Other People’s Countries, a memoir of his Belgian childhood, Patrick McGuinness writes: “I sometimes think it’s getting worse, this past business, that it’s rising up in me like damp creeping up a wall…

We’ve been celebrating Shakespeare’s 450th birthday week with fun, festivals, exhibitions, a cake competition – and the launch of an improbably epic tour of Hamlet from the Globe in London “to every country…

Novelist, short story writer, journalist, film critic, writer of screen plays, Gabriel García Márquez was a man of many facets and extraordinary skill. He achieved that rare feat for a Latin American writer…

The extent of Shakespeare’s legacy 450 years on from his birth is incalculable. But this, of course, does not stop some from trying. To many the crown of Britain’s cultural output, Shakespeare is integral…

116 of Gallant’s stories appeared in the New Yorker.
MemsphereFebruary 28, 2014

Mavis Gallant, the Canadian doyenne of the short story, died aged 91 in Paris on February 18th. This marked the end of a writing career that spanned more that five decades and two continents. Gallant is…

So J K Rowling is having second thoughts about pairing off Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter. She says that it would never work and she ought to have allowed Hermione to marry Harry, but didn’t as she followed…

The decision to award the TS Eliot poetry prize to Northern Ireland poet Sinéad Morrissey has been greeted with the usual poorly punctuated grumblings about how poetry has lost its way, together with mainly…

Heads of Australian university English departments are set to advocate for their discipline.
oldtastyDecember 5, 2013

Last month, heads of English departments in universities across Australia formed a new peak body to advocate for the discipline of English. In part, the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) group…

When it was revealed this weekend that JK Rowling was the author of a recent critically acclaimed but obscure crime novel - The Cuckoo’s Calling by one Robert Galbraith - it made perfect sense to many…

Welcome to the first essay in our series on how the Australian landscape has been described in literature. We start with an internationally recognised D. H. Lawrence scholar, Christopher Pollnitz, writing…